Kitty watched as the male stripper at the bachelorette party came out of the gentlemen's restroom wearing his regular clothes again. He had a limp as he walked across the hotel lobby and sat down on a bench next to her. "I noticed you left the room as I was beginning my act," he said, bending over to pull his sock off of his foot. His toes were swelling, turning purple. She'd left the party room and hidden in the lobby bathroom as soon as the stripper had torn off his chaps and jumped up on a table. Watching a handsome man dance in a silver thong and red cowboy boots while her old high school girlfriends screamed and whistled just made her feel small and ridiculous. She felt just like she had in junior high at the roller rink during the couple-skate when no one picked her.

"I'm sorry," she said, because it probably was a very rude thing to have walked away in the middle of his performance. She hoped she hadn't hurt his feelings. "I'm just feeling a little sick to my stomach because I ate too much Easter candy." She couldn't think of anything else to say, and she had eaten too much Easter candy—that was true. She couldn't help herself. Every year it was the same.

"When I was a little boy," said the stripper, "My Grandpa used to tell me a story about the Easter Bunny and how he lived by himself on Easter Island hiding Easter eggs. Inside each egg was a different special candy or jewel or toy. The Easter Bunny would hide them all year long, getting more and more excited about each marvelous egg and thinking about how happy someone would be to find it. And then on Easter morning, he'd go down to the beach at dawn and wait for a boat to come ashore, for someone to visit him, to hunt those Easter eggs. He'd wait and wait and watch the water. But no one ever came."

"That's a sad story," said Kitty. She could picture the Easter Bunny sitting on the sand, his little white head getting hot as the sun baked down. She wanted to say that she would have gotten in a boat and paddled out to Easter Island if only she'd known. But she didn't say another word because it was hard to talk to such a handsome man. "I think you're the only person in this hotel who hasn't seen me naked," said the stripper. "There must have been two hundred people who crammed into that convention room to watch me take my clothes off. Are those girls friends of yours? They were really rough and I fell off a chair." He touched his swollen foot with his fingers.

"I don't really know them any more," said Kitty. They'd all either gotten married or were going to. She was the only one still on her own.

"Sometimes when I'm up there, dancing," said the stripper, "And I'm shaking my stuff and people are grabbing my legs and shoving dollars in my g-string, sometimes I pretend I'm the Easter Bunny, waiting there on Easter Island all alone. Sitting under a palm tree, staring out to sea, waiting for a ship to come ashore." The stripper tried to stand up, but when put weight on his swollen foot, he almost fell.

"Don't worry," said Kitty, reaching out to catch him. What a funny feeling—the heaviness of his body in her arms. "I've got you."